Graphical User Interfaces (GUI)s are a common manner of exchanging information between a user and a computer in a modern information processing environment. The graphical user interfaces typically follow a well known window-based structure. The window-based structure allows a screen display to present one or more rectangular windows, each having a particular context. An active window from among the available displayed window corresponds to an application that the user is currently exchanging information with. The windows are navigated via a pointing device, such as a mouse, touchpad or trackball, to select, activate, and provide input to the application corresponding to the window, and the keyboard is often employed for free form textual and/or numeric input.
The windows display and receive control and data information through objects or icons displayed in the window. The underlying application arranges the objects as appropriate for displaying and receiving information. The display objects include control objects, which receive input from the user, and passive objects, that present information but do not expect interactive responses. The typical conventional GUI window presents multiple simultaneous display objects, driven by the underlying application. Often, a user will manipulate the objects with the pointing device or keyboard for selecting and changing the appearance of the windows to facilitate data entry or to more readily obtain or receive information from the application. Often, the GUIs display a set or list of content items, which are objects such as files that contain data, or information. Such content items also have metadata associated with the objects. Metadata is “data about the data,” which describes attributes of a content item, such as type, size, format and creation date. Conventional metadata is often stored with, or appurtenant to, the content item to which it pertains. Therefore, metadata is often retrieved by a GUI when accessing the content item for display or invocation by a computer driven application. In this manner, GUIs provide an effective interactive communication medium between a user and the computer driven application.